Out of the Frying Pan And Into the Antipodes--Recipes & reminiscences from 70-plus years of New Zealand & Australian food; with some of the loves, some of the lovers, and some of the culinary & social history.(A few names & places have been changed to protect the guilty)

Wednesday, 16 January 2019

We never had
duck at home: it was just too expensive and very hard to get—in fact, before we
had frozen poultry and supermarkets, unobtainable to ordinary New Zealanders,
unless you kept your own ducks or had someone in the family who went shooting.

Le canard pékinois enchaîné

In Paris in
the 1970s I had Peking Duck with Claude; that must have been the first time I
had duck. It was the only Chinese dish he liked: he took me to the nearest Chinese
restaurant, in a side street just off our street in the 10ième, nearer to the grands boulevards, several times, once
with his friend Michel but other times just us. He’d always order just the
Peking Duck and never let me pay. The flip side of the coin being that that was
the only dish he’d order! It was nice but not extraordinary. Poor Claude had
the most tremendous crush on the rather pretty young Chinese waiter, but as far
as I could see the young man, though he was very polite, (a) wasn’t interested
and (b) thought he was mad to just order the duck, bare!

Duck for Cover!

Domestic
ducks are very fatty. Wild ducks are said not to be, or this is the received
wisdom: I’ve never had wild duck. The first part of the adage, however, is most
certainly true. I’ve only managed to afford duck a couple of times. The first
dish I did, roast duck, was very nearly a disaster. It generated so much fat
that it overflowed the baking dish and made a horrible mess in the bottom of
the oven, a flood well over a centimetre deep. I was very lucky it didn’t set the oven alight. The experience was so
traumatic that I can’t recall what the duck tasted like.

No wonder today’s moronic telly chefs muck
around for ages (or their unseen slaves in the background do), skinning their
duck breasts and either roasting or pan-grilling the skin separately and tra-la-la…
Oven-roasting a whole domestic duck is a very risky business!

By the way, notice how they always do the
duck breasts very rare? This is because they’re incapable of cooking them through
and not making them either tough or, since they lack the fat, very dry. Yeah.
You can keep your half-raw poultry, thanks, self-appointed culinary experts.

Duck-a-licious

By contrast, the
second dish I tried making was delightful. It was a cold dish, “en daube”, set in jelly. It’s fiddly to
make but at the time I was a lot younger and keener, and followed the
directions slavishly—though I seem to recall I didn’t manage to source all the
herbs. It’s a classic Elizabeth David recipe:

Canard en daube

You need 1 large duck or 2 small ones. One
which is old and too tough for roasting will do very well for this dish.

Prepare a number of little strips of bacon
and the following mixture of herbs:

A handful
of parsley, 2 shallots, chives, a clove of garlic, a bay-leaf, a sprig of
thyme, a few leaves of basil, salt, pepper, a scrap of grated nutmeg.

Chop all these very finely and roll each strip of bacon in this mixture.
Make incisions all over the duck and lard it with the pieces of bacon. Truss
the duck and put it into a casserole or braising pan into which it just fits,
and pour over it two tumblers of white wine, the same quantity of water and a
liqueur glass of brandy. Cover the pan and cook the duck very slowly indeed for
3-4 hours. The sauce will reduce and, when cold, should turn to jelly.

When the duck is cooked, place it in the serving dish; leave the sauce
to get cold, so that you can take off the fat, warm it [i.e. the sauce] again
slightly and then pour it over the duck, and leave it to set. The duck will be
very well cooked, so it will be perfectly easy to carve at the table.

Funnily enough,
although we never ate duck in New Zealand back in the Fifties and Sixties—and
only saw live ducks at the zoo or in the Domain—we absorbed the current
received wisdom, aka old wives’ tales, about ducks.

Clucky?

Clutches of
ducklings, so the story runs, were traditionally often fostered by hens in the
farmyard, perhaps because they supposedly made better mothers than the ducks
did. It’s certainly a story I heard in my youth. This Victorian picture
illustrates it.

Dangerous?

Never eat raw
duck eggs. I’ve known that all my life, from so early that I have no memory at
all of first being told it. This was a serious warning in the 1950s, when
refrigerated whipped puddings were all the rage, and most of them were made
with beaten egg whites. (See “A Christmas Pudding From Katherine”.)

We did occasionally get duck eggs in the 1950s,
but I’m blessed if I know where from. Everybody had large back yards on their
quarter-acre sections, of course, and quite a few people kept chooks—though
this was ceasing to be the norm—but we didn’t know anybody who kept ducks. I
suppose Mr Green the grocer occasionally got some in.

The message was that duck eggs could have
duck poo in them. It wasn’t until years and years later that I learned why:
ducks, unlike hens, only have one tube for both eggs and poo to come down, and
there is always the chance of contamination—and hence a dose of salmonellosis.
Okay, never eat raw duck eggs. It's quite safe to use them in baking, however.

The Literary
Duck, With Covers

Apart from
the stories absorbed at our mother’s knee, our main knowledge of ducks came
from books. I’m pretty sure I heard the story of Jemima Puddle-duck when I was
about four or five, so, 1948-1949, but we didn’t own the book back then. It
must have been a borrowed copy. About ten years later we had our own copy
and my little sisters listened to it with bated breath. That foxy gentleman was
so scary! (Exactly what this story
reveals about its creator’s psyche, possibly better not to enquire!)

I think the next book I knew that had ducks in
it was probably the lovely hardback non-fiction volume, profusely illustrated
with black and white photographs, that I was given when I was about seven. I wish
I could remember its title! It was an English book, intended for children,
about animals and birds, from which I absorbed all sorts of interesting and useful
facts about a range of English creatures, only some of which ever made it out
to the Antipodes. Fallow deer, that’s right! It had several sorts of English
deer. And I think swallow-tail butterflies, too. And, um, English thrushes? Yes,
I’m pretty sure it had a lovely picture of a thrush. They have been introduced
in New Zealand, so I guess that one was sort of relevant! It helped to
illuminate all those Enid Blytons I read, that’s for sure! Though the
vernacular of the “William” books remained opaque.

The “Library”
Van

Such a very English
volume might seem an odd choice for a child living in New Zealand, but there
was nothing like it published locally: we didn’t own a single New Zealand children’s
book until I was about eleven, at which point some misguided relative or friend
gave us a wishy-washily illustrated volume of Maori legends rewritten for
children. Not really this well-meaning donor’s fault: there simply was nothing
else in the nineteen-fifties. We were lucky, though: our parents were both
readers, so we were encouraged to borrow books from the entrepreneurial Mr Armour
with his library van. He owned a bookshop and stationer’s in the next suburb:
it was a completely private enterprise. To us as kids it seemed a norm, but
looking back, we were incredibly fortunate. A family that had about 1/3d (one shilling
and threepence) left over from the weekly wage, no kidding, would never have been
able to buy its kids the number of books we got through! The nearest public
library was miles away, with no direct bus service at all. I got to know Honeybunch
and the Bobbsey twins through Mr Armour’s van, followed by Just William, of
course, and the egregious Darrell of Malory Towers, and a little later the
Swallows and Amazons. Not to say Biggles and co.! Actually, if we had been anywhere
near a public library we’d really have lost out: in those days librarians disapproved
entirely of most of these offerings, an attitude which lasted well into the
eighties, and as far as Enid Blyton’s concerned, well beyond. When they finally
built a brand-new library at the nearest big centre, about half an hour away on
the very infrequent buses, we recognised the Arthur Ransomes with relief, but
that was about it. Just as well I was too old for most of my old favourites by
then, because I certainly wouldn’t have found them at Takapuna Public Library.

Ping! …Missed

The world of
Honeybunch, the Bobbsey twins and Pollyanna seemed no stranger to me than that
of the Famous Five (I was convinced for years that “Quentin”, their uncle, was
a made-up name): I certainly never realised that they came from different sides
of the Atlantic! Mr Armour’s van was crammed with American children’s
classics—well, definitely classics in their way, never mind the experts on children’sliterature (dreadful expression) I encountered in later life—but
there were some that he missed, and The
Story About Ping was one of them. I’d have been too old for it by then, but
if he had stocked it, I’m sure Mum would have borrowed it for my younger sister.

I shouldn’t be so grudging about those well-meaning
ladies who introduced me to the study of “children’s literature” and the real
definition of a “picture book”, because it was they who showed me Kurt Wiese’s completely
charming illustrations of the famous Chinese duck, Ping. Chinese-American: the
book is American but the illustrator had lived in China.

The picture above, from AbeBooks.com, shows
the cover of a well-used first edition, from 1933. A reprint edition is available
from Amazon.com, so you can still get to see Wiese’s really great talent as an
illustrator. Ping, though he is a bit yellow—well, he is Chinese, and the book
does date from the nineteen-thirties—Is definitely one of the best ducks in
literature: a very duck-like duck!

Tuesday, 11 December 2018

The sweet known
as “White Christmas” is an Australian specialty, a kind of white fudge. Like many
home-made sweets, it’s made in a solid slab and then cut up into pieces.

The base ingredient is a vegetable fat
which remains solid and stable at room temperature: either the hydrogenated coconut
oil “copha” (the Australian term; in New Zealand it’s Kremelta), or white chocolate,
which is sweetened cocoa butter (theobroma oil) from the cocoa bean.

To
this base the usual additions are glacé cherries, and any of a range of
secondary ingredients such as other dried or crystallised fruits, rice bubbles
(a favourite), desiccated coconut, nuts, a sweetener, and often a dairy option
such as milk powder or even cream.

Healthy? No.

Before we
look at the recipes, let’s get our facts straight. You didn’t think that sweets
were gonna be good for you in any case, didja? No. However, given the current
food fads, especially the fervent advocacy of coconut products, let’s find out exactly
what we’re talking about, here. “White Christmas” may be based on copha or on
white chocolate—but claims that one is healthier for you than the other are
spurious. White chocolate does have less saturated fat than copha, but both are
very high in saturated fat. And copha is something that should be eaten infrequently
in very small quantities: not used as a base for anything you bake regularly.
You’ll quite often see it in slice recipes. Avoid it.

*** Copha

Copha, as it’s
called in Australia (“Kremelta” in New Zealand) is hydrogenated (solidified) coconut
oil. You can find out all about coconut oil from Wikipedia’s excellent article “Coconut
Oil” and believe you me, after reading it you won't ever believe it's healthy
again. Here’s what it says on the process of turning the oil into a solid:

Hydrogenation

RBD [refined, bleached, and deodorized] coconut oil can
be processed further into partially or fully hydrogenated oil to increase its
melting point. …

In the process
of hydrogenation, unsaturated fats (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty
acids) are combined with hydrogen in a catalytic process to make them more
saturated. Coconut oil contains only 6% monounsaturated and 2% polyunsaturated
fatty acids. In the partial hydrogenation process, some of these are
transformed into trans fatty acids.

“White
chocolate is a chocolate derivative. It commonly consists of cocoa butter,
sugar and milk solids and is characterized by a pale yellow or ivory
appearance.” (“White chocolate”, Wikipedia). Cocoa butter is the vegetable fat
extracted from cocoa beans. Wikipedia’s article on it tells us: “It contains a
high proportion of saturated fats as well as monounsaturated oleic acid.” (“Cocoa
Butter”, Wikipedia).

*** Let’s
compare fat facts

The list
below, compiled from the two Wikipedia articles mentioned above, shows you the
comparative fat content of coconut oil, cocoa butter, and a couple of popular
cooking oils. The percentages are of the weight of total fats (fatty acids) in
each.

Coconut Oil:

82.5% Saturated

6.3%Monounsaturated

1.7%Polyunsaturated:

Cocoa Butter:

57 - 64% Saturated

29 - 43% Monounsaturated

0 - 5%Polyunsaturated

Canola Oil:

7.4%Saturated

63.3% Monounsaturated

28.1% Polyunsaturated

Olive Oil:

13.8% Saturated

73%Monounsaturated

10.5% Polyunsaturated

If the unhydrogenated
coconut oil is 82.5 percent saturated fats, the hydrogenated copha is going to
be even higher. Oh, dear. Because white chocolate is a commercial product it’s impossible
to tell exactly how much saturated fat each version contains, but since it’s
mainly cocoa butter, it’s a very high proportion. Not as high as copha, no, but
it’s not gonna be healthy!

But gee, who gorges on fat-laden foods at Christmas,
anyway?

The Forerunners

Such easy-to-make
recipes as “White Christmas” and its cousin “Rocky Road” have replaced the earlier
home-made sweets created as slabs to be cut up, such as nougat, which were much
harder to make. This 1959 recipe from The
Australian Women’s Weekly is typical, entailing a lot of hard beating:

Place sugar and glucose into saucepan, add
water, stir with wooden spoon over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Boil
steadily to 240deg. F. Pour into basin. When cool but not cold, beat for 3
minutes, then fold in stiffly beaten egg-white, cherries, nuts, vanilla, and
lemon juice. Continue beating until white and stiff. Press into greased
bar-tin. When set, cut into blocks.

(The
Australian Women's Weekly, Wednesday 2 December 1959)

In this combination we see the old-fashioned
version of the Christmassy combination of red glacé cherries and a white base
which now typifies “White Christmas.”

Later, in 1980, Mrs L. Pescott had another
version of this nougat, in her Early
Settlers Household Lore, a large collection of what she claimed were old traditional
Australian recipes. A lot of them clearly have nothing to do with early settlers,
they were just her friends’ and relations’ favourites of the moment. But some of
them are old recipes, and the ones in her section on “Sweetmeats” look pretty genuine.
Most of them entail a lot of hard work—not to mention knowing the tricks to
make the thing turn out right! “Twisted Hair”, for instance, is a recipe for
pulled toffee (often “pulled taffy” in the older American books), which would have
been over a hundred years old. Likewise “The Vicar’s Barley Sugar”, shaped into
twists in the old way that most of us would never have heard of in 1980. And “Marzipan”
is very old, far predating most of the others.

Cherry and Nut Nougat

1 oz. halved glace cherries;1 oz. chopped walnuts;

6 ozs. granulated sugar; 1/2 gill water (1/4 pint);

1 level teaspoon honey;1 egg white;

a few drops of lemon juice;a sheet of rice paper

A tin six inches square will be required.

Line the tin with half the rice paper.
Dissolve the sugar in the water in a medium sized pan over gentle heat. Make sure
every grain of sugar is dissolved before the mixture comes to the boil. Add the
honey.

Bring the mixture to the boil and boil it continuously,
without stirring, for 3 or 4 minutes until the syrup seems thicker.

To test for the right consistency, drop a
little of the syrup into a cup of cold water and when it is ready it should roll
into a firm ball between the fingers. As soon as this stage is reached, take
the pan off the heat

Quickly whip the egg white stiffly then beat
the syrup into the egg white. Stir in the lemon juice, cherries and nuts and
pout the nougat into the lined tin.

Cover the nougat with the rest of the rice paper.
Leave the nougat overnight or until it is absolutely cold. Cut the nougat into
rectangles.

There is a recipe in the new edition of The Golden Wattle Cookery Book (Thirty
sixth impression, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1999, reprinted 2005), but this
book has been added to over the years since it was first published in 1926, so
there’s no telling when each recipe was written.

Irving Berlin’s song White Christmas as sung by Bing Crosby was well known years before the
famous movie came out in 1954, as I mentioned in the “Snap, Crackle, Slice” blog
article. But the recipe? Well, in 1948 it wasn’t a recipe, it was a bathing
suit:

Presumably the sweet took its name from the
song: when the film came out it became even more popular than it had originally
been.

The sweet considerably post-dates the movie.
The first published version of the recipe I could find under the now traditional
name, “White Christmas,” is in The
Australian Women’s Weekly of 15 November 1978; two years earlier, however,
we can discern its culinary roots in the same magazine’s “Ripe Cherry Slice” of
8 December 1976:

Ripe Cherry Slice

250g (8 oz) dark chocolate;1 1/2 cups coconut;

30g (1 oz) solid white vegetable shortening [copha/Kremelta];

1/4 cup ground almonds;1/2 cup icing sugar; 2 egg whites;

2 tablespoons rum;125g (4 oz) glace cherries

Melt chopped chocolate and vegetable shortening
in top of double saucepan over simmering water.

Place
the chocolate in a heatproof bowl placed over a saucepan of simmering water and
stir until melted and smooth. Stir in the almonds, apricot, walnuts and ginger.

Pour
into a 26cm x 16cm tin lined with non-stick baking paper and smooth top with
the back of a spoon.

Refrigerate
for 1 hour or until set. Turn out and cut into long slices.

–Makes 20.

(Donna Hay Magazine. Issue 42 (Dec
2008-Jan 2009))

You can see that it uses white chocolate,
not copha: white chocolate is a much
more up-market ingredient!

A few
years later in Bite website The New
Zealand Woman’s Weekly reprises this mixture but adds rice bubbles and mini
marshmallows, popping the result into paper cases, cupcake-fashion (cupcakes being
very In with the middle-class Antipodean housewives, this decade):

White Christmas
Clusters

180g
white chocolate;1/4 cup cream;

1 1/2
cups rice bubbles; 1 1/2 cups marshmallows [mini];

75g dried
apricots

1.
Place chopped chocolate and cream in a heat-proof bowl and melt over a saucepan
of simmering water or melt in a microwave.

The same magazine, at around the same time
in the same website, also gives the now traditional version with the glacé
cherries—except that it adds currants. An odd touch; was it supposed to make it
original?

White Christmas

2 1/2 cups rice bubbles;1 cup coconut;

3/4 cup icing sugar;1 cup milk powder

1 cup glace cherries;1/2 cup currants

250g vegetable shortening [Kremelta/copha]

1.
Combine all ingredients except vegetable shortening.

2.
Melt vegetable shortening over a low heat and stir into the dry ingredients.
Press mixture into a baking-paper-lined 20cm square slice pan.

The sweet “White
Christmas” has become such a cultural icon in Australia that collections of its
variants are now being published: try the BestRecipes feature for Christmas 2018,
“11
White Christmas treats to enjoy with a cuppa.” The website notes: “You’ll
be dreaming of a winter wonderland with these sweet treats.”

If you
like peppermint, their “White Christmas
Peppermint Surprise” looks intriguing!

Katy Only Slightly Crazy

About Me

Katy Widdop / Kathy Boyes writes the “What We Ate” blog, documenting 70-odd (some very odd) years of personal experience of the food of New Zealand & Australia, with excursions into French and Indian food, and some of the history of the recipes, as far back as Mrs Beeton and sometimes even further.